Storm Prey Part 21

LUCAS WAS friendly with the head of the department of corrections, who hooked him up with an a.s.sistant warden at Stillwater.

"If anybody sees him talking to you, he'll have bigger problems than he already has," the warden said. "But come on; I'll figure out something."

Lucas and Del went together, a half-hour ride, checked in, and got with the a.s.sistant warden, whose name was Jon Orff. Orff came down to the entry hall to get them, led them back through a maze of offices.

"I had the guy who's in charge of disciplinary action pull him off the job," Orff said. "He's down in an isolation unit. Should be okay."

They rattled down through the prison, through security gates, to isolation, a bunch of human-sized metal lunch boxes. Orff had the guard pop the electronic lock and they went in. Clark, a heavy, soft-looking man with a small brown mustache, was lying on the bunk, feet crossed, staring at the ceiling. He sat up when they came in.

"Now what?" he asked. He had one uncontrolled eye that would wander toward the outside edge of his eye socket, then pop back to the center.

"We're cops," Lucas said. "We need to talk to you about some friends of yours."

"Ah, man, they're gonna break my arms out there," he said.

"That's why we were careful about putting you in here. And you'll stay for a couple days," Orff said.

"What do I get?" Clark asked. His eye wandered off.

"I'll leave two hundred fifty dollars with Jon, earmarked for a TV," Lucas said.

Clark brightened, but then tried to frown. "That's it?"

"That's it," Lucas said. "We're not asking you to talk about anybody in here. We want to know about the Mack brothers."

"I'm gonna have to have something more," Clark said.

"There is no more," Del said. "We're buying this TV out of our own pockets. The courts aren't involved, the prosecutors, n.o.body. We can't do a thing for you, except the TV"

"How about some lunch money, some--"

"Nothing," Lucas said. He looked at his watch. "If you pick out a cheap TV, you can have the rest of the two-fifty. Start talking, or we start walking. We don't have time to screw around."

Clark scratched his mustache, arched his eyebrows, and said, "Be a harda.s.s. Okay. I don't know what I can tell you ..."

"How well do you know the Macks?"

"Pretty good. We used to hang together, years ago. When they were just getting started with Cherries. I'd still go by a couple nights a week, when I was in the Cities."

"Joe Mack is on the run, on a kidnap-murder," Del said. "Who'd put him up? Who'd hide him?"

"You know about his dad over in Wisconsin ..."

"Yeah, Ike. We're headed that way."

"You know ... murder-kidnap doesn't sound like Joe. Was he high on something?"

"Not as far as we know. He did it cold--strangled a woman. Mother of two little daughters."

"Jeez. That really really doesn't sound like Joe. You sure you got the right guy?" doesn't sound like Joe. You sure you got the right guy?"

"Yes. He flipped out," Lucas said. "Look, you haven't earned a TV set yet."

"A guy named Phil Lighter, who lives west of here, somewhere," Clark said. "West of Stillwater. He drives for a limo service over in Minneapolis."

"How are they connected?" Del asked.

"Old friends. Go back to school. This one time, some school-kids found a dead wolf with his tail cut off, and they called the game wardens, and somebody said Phil had been driving round with a bushy tail on his car, and they went looking for him," Clark said. His eye wandered off, he blinked, and it popped back. "The story was, Phil went down and hid out with Joe for the rest of the winter and spring. By the summer, when he went back home, the wardens, you know, they'd given it up. They didn't have any real proof, and the case was so long gone, they'd just moved on, I guess."

"So he owes Joe," Orff said.

"Well, that was a long time ago. But, you know what I mean. They're that kind of buddies. I mean them crick d.i.c.ks, they get pretty harsh if you go killing a wolf."

"Who else?" Del asked.

"I only know one more where he might hide, this guy named James ..."

WHEN THEY WALKED out of the prison, leaving behind an envelope with $250, Del said, "This James guy sounds like a figment of somebody's imagination. But I'd like to talk to Lighter."

"Yeah." Lucas looked at his cell phone: call from Virgil, a half hour past. Lucas punched the redial and Virgil came up.

"You oughta come over here," Virgil said. "I got somebody I want you to hear."

"Weather's okay?"

"Yeah, she's doing something right now. Some kid was messing around with a nail gun, and nailed his face."

"Be there in half an hour," Lucas said.

VIRGIL WAS SITTING in the lounge reading a Men's Journal Men's Journal when Lucas and Del walked in. He dropped it on the couch and stood up and stretched and said, "Weather just called me. She's done, but she has to hang around for a while--she needs to talk to some parents about care, and stuff." when Lucas and Del walked in. He dropped it on the couch and stood up and stretched and said, "Weather just called me. She's done, but she has to hang around for a while--she needs to talk to some parents about care, and stuff."

"So what's up?" Lucas asked.

"Come on back," Lucas said. "I got to chatting with this woman, this nurse, who was in the pharmacy when the old guy got kicked to death."

"Baker," Lucas remembered.

"Yeah. Dorothy." Virgil led them down a couple of corridors, to a small office full of nurses looking at clipboards and files. He spotted Baker, who was staring at a computer screen, and called, "Dorothy ..."

Baker saw him, smiled, walked across the room, and Virgil held the door so she could step into the hallway. Virgil said, "Let's go down to the lounge in Imaging."

They found a waiting area for people lined up for CAT scans; n.o.body there, and they took chairs, and Virgil introduced them. Then Virgil said, "So I was talking with Dorothy, here, about the idea that one of these guys was a doctor. I asked her why she thought he might be a doctor."

He nodded at Baker, who turned to Lucas and Del and said, "I didn't really remember why I thought that, until I was talking to Virgil ..." She patted Virgil's arm. "... and then I remember, when we were going over everything, word for word, that one of these men asked, 'What about this?' And the other man said, 'Lortab. It's hydrocodone with acetaminophen.' The way he knew that, and the way he said, 'a-seat-a-min-o-phen,' which is this funny-looking word if you don't say it all the time, made me think he was a doctor." She hesitated, then said, "Maybe."

"The next thing is, Dorothy told the Minneapolis cops that he had some kind of an accent. The guy who came in later, who they didn't see. So, I'm pretty good with accents ..."

She laughed, and patted his arm again. "Every one of his accents sounds exactly the same. Like Wile E. Coyote."

"That's not what you said at the time," Virgil said.

"But she's right," Del said.

Baker said, "Virgil got me laughing, and then we were trying out all those accents, you know, Mexican, German, French. And I thought, you know, he did sound like a French guy. But I couldn't swear to it."

"And that's about it," Virgil said to Lucas. He turned to Dorothy. "You've been great. Thank you."

"If there's anything else, just call," she said.

When she was gone, Virgil said, "I believe her about the doctor thing. Del says, why would a doc go down for that little money? But I just believe her. She talks to doctors and nurses and administration people and orderlies all day, and if she said the guy was a doc, I believe it. Then, when she decided that the accent might have been French ..."

Lucas took a minute to get it: Gabriel Maret.

He said, "Ah, boy. Do we know where Gabe was, when Weather arrived?"

"He got there a couple minutes before she did," Virgil said. "He was still in street clothes. They were talking outside the OR."

"Now I don't know what to do," Lucas said. "And I don't buy it, Virgil--he's a good man. Not only that, he's got a load of money."

"For sure?"

Lucas made a face, then, "Well, that's what I understand."

"Okay. But I thought I should run it by you. You're the big guy."

Lucas said, "Let's see how many more Frenchies there are in the hospital. Medical people who know how to say a-ceet-ohmy-a-fin."

Virgil corrected him, "A-seat-a-min-o-phen."

"Let's see how many there are," Lucas said. "Christ, I don't even want to mention this to Weather. She's gonna go ballistic."

"You could chicken out--tip Marcy's investigators, let them take the heat," Del said.

Lucas: "I suppose."

"But not really," Del said. "It's our find. We oughta run with it."

"What Del said," Virgil said.

Lucas nodded, then grinned at them: "Not gonna let those clown shoes from Minneapolis take it away from us, huh?" He thought for a moment, then said, "Okay. But I'm not telling Weather about Gabe. He's a friend of ours."

"Somebody ought to mention it," Virgil said.

Lucas looked at him, and said, "Yeah. Somebody should."

VIRGIL WOULD START looking for people with French accents who worked in the hospital, Lucas decided, since he was there most of the day anyway. "I'll get Shrake and Jenkins to haul Weather back home, so you can stay late," Lucas told Virgil. "Del and I are gonna jack up a guy named Lighter."

LUCAS AND DEL had called Lighter's name in to Lucas's secretary, Carol, and asked her to run him through the NCIC. On the way back across town, she called with the bad news, and Lucas put it on the speakerphone.

"... charged six times with a.s.sault, two possession of controlled substances, which was speed ... note in the file says he's a steroid guy, weight lifter. Spent most of his twenties working as a bouncer over on Hennepin Avenue, got too old for that, now he's a driver for Blackjack Limousine Service."

"How old?" Del asked.

"Thirty-seven. He spent two years in Stillwater for beating up a Minneapolis cop named Lancaster after a Rolling Stones concert back in 'ninety-nine. He said he didn't know Lancaster was a cop, thought he was trying to crack security lines around the Stones."

"I remember that," Lucas said. "Don Lancaster. He had a fractured skull, or something."

"That's it. Lighter's alibi failed to hold up because Lancaster was wearing a uniform at the time."

"That's a bad alibi," Del said.

"Yes. He's been remanded for drug treatment a couple times, all the way back to when he was a juvie, but it looks like it didn't take," Carol said. "You guys be careful."

LIGHTER'S PLACE was a junkyard: three or four acres of buck-thorn, scrubby red cedar, and weeds, punctuated by the rusting hulks of eighties and nineties cars, rotted-out snowmobiles, trashed trail bikes, all surrounding a two-story house covered with thirties-era gray tar s.h.i.+ngles.

A deck, a few years old, stuck incongruously out of one side of the house, next to an anachronistic sliding-gla.s.s door. An oversized charcoal grill, made out of a metal barrel cut in half, sat on the deck, with the cooking implements still hanging on the side. A Jeep and two Oldsmobiles, though older and rusting out, sat in the driveway and appeared to be in running condition.

"If this guy doesn't have six pit bulls, I'll kiss your a.s.s," Del said.

"I don't see any stakes in the yard," Lucas said.

"You watch," Del said. "Six."

They got out and both of them touched their guns, then Lucas led the way to the front door through the crunchy snow. He knocked on the aluminum storm door, and there was a thump inside, as if somebody had fallen off a couch, and a minute later, the inner door opened a crack, and a woman put her nose in the crack. "What?"

Lucas held up his ID: "Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We need to chat with Phil Lighter."

"Phil's working," the woman said.